Portugal - The First Global Empire

8/18/2019 Portugal - The First Global Empire

1/8

HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER

The First Global


2/8

OCTOBER HISTORY TODAY

PORTUGAL

Arabia and India, from the Miller Atlas, Portugal, c.1519.

Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of latemedieval Europe. But its seafarers created theage of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this

day, as Roger Crowley explains.

Empire

IN THE DYING YEARS of the 15th century Portugal surprised the

world. Vasco de Gama’s landfall on the Indian Coast in May 1498 was

so unexpected that it strained credibility. A garbled rumour reachedthe Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli that ‘three caravels belonging to

the king of Portugal have arrived at Aden and Calicut in India and that

they have been sent to find out about the spice islands and that their

captain is Columbus’. His initial response was a mixture of shock and

disbelief: ‘This news affects me greatly, if it’s true’, he wrote. ‘However

I don’t give credence to it.’ Priuli was registering the first reaction to a

seismic shift in the comprehension of our planet: Gama’s voyage had

finally demolished the ancient authority of Ptolemaic geography, which

held the Indian Ocean to be a closed lake.

Priuli’s misattribution anticipated the extent to which Columbus has

come to dominate the historiography of the age of discoveries. While

1492 is conventionally the watershed moment, the largely forgotten role

of the Portuguese in begetting the early modern era is also immense. Fora century they led the way in connecting the hemispheres and giving

its people a new sense of their place in the world. Alongside the age of

Columbus, there is an equally significant Vasco da Gama era of history.

Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope was the result of 60

years of effort. Portugal was poor, small and marginal to the arena of

the Mediterranean world, but its long Atlantic coast gave it unique skills

in navigation, cartography and open-sea sailing and it had developed a

precocious sense of national identity. The search for India was a stop-

start affair, concerned initially with slaving and a hunt for gold – Henry

the Navigator’s reputation as a founding father of scientific exploration

has now been largely dismantled – but decade by decade the Portuguese

worked their way down the west coast of Africa, exploring its great rivers

and mapping the coastline. Lisbon, open to the sea, gave Europe a first

taste of a world beyond itself. The African voyages transformed thecity into the go-to place for new ideas about cosmography. The produce

unloaded on its shores – spices, slaves, parrots, sugar – conjured up

exotic possibilities. In the 1490s, as Columbus sailed west, Portuguese

navigators finally cracked the code of the South Atlantic winds.

THE YEAR APPRENTICESHIP slogging down the African coast

enabled the Portuguese to develop a methodology of knowledge acqu-

isition based on first-hand observation. They became expert observers

and collectors of geographical and c ultural information. They garnered

this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants, employing in-

terpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific

interest, drawing the best maps they could, refining their deployment

of diplomacy and violence. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the


3/8


4/8


With the exception of Brazil, the Portuguese, unlike the Spanish, did

not conceive an empire of territorial possession. There were far too few

of them and mortality in the tropics was high. Their early ambition to

control the whole Indian Ocean relied on no more than 3,000 men at

any one time. It was a world, in its more pacific manifestations, of mobile

trading links, held together by ports and forts and redoubtable sailing

ships, up to a size of 1,000 tons. In the process they shunted people

around the world. The Portuguese exported themselves in sufficient

numbers at times to worry the civic authorities at home. Emigrationcame in many forms, both voluntary or compulsory: as servants of

empire – colonial administrators, factors and soldiers – sailors, mer-

chants, fortune seekers, missionaries and convicts. Because these em-

igrants were largely male, they were formative in the creation of mixed

race communities. In Goa this was a matter of state policy.

Men were encouraged to marry local women, giving rise to

a unique Luso-Indian society. A hallmark of the Portuguese

diaspora has been the creation of creole societies.

T

HE WILLINGNESS to explore, to push beyond the

limits of the known world, took many forms. Men

went in search of gold, to seek religious converts,

out of wanderlust, as ambassadors, merchants, spies,

smugglers and pirates. Many just vanished off the map. TheArab-speaking Pêro da Covilhã, sent via Cairo to seek out the

spice routes in advance of a final push for India, criss-crossed

the Indian Ocean disguised as a Muslim merchant, visited

Mecca and resurfaced in Ethiopia 30 years later. Bento de

Góis, travelling as an Armenian, left Goa in 1602 and took five

years to reach China through the Himalayas. Pedro Teixeira

performed the remarkable feat of travelling upstream the

length of the Amazon in the 1630s. Jesuits were in Bhutan

and Tibet in the same period: missionaries were particularly

indefatigable travellers and language learners. By the middle

of the 17th century they had baptised probably over a million

people from Mozambique to the Far East. They were most

successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts untiltheir activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were

either expelled or killed.

Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a

founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exempli-

fied the sometimes desperate qualities of Portugal’s adventur-

ers. He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance:

a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East

for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in

the Mekong Delta (he swam ashore clutching his manuscript

above his head while his Chinese lover drowned). ‘Had there

been more of the world’, Camões wrote of the Portuguese

explorers, they ‘would have discovered it.’

THE PORTUGUESE WERE also pathfinders in some of thebleaker aspects of European expansion. They invented Atlantic

slavery. Tapping into an ancient trade in black slaves from sub-Saharan

Africa, they were bundling captured people into cramped caravels back to

Portugal from Senegambia as early as the 1440s. The chronicle account

of human beings unloaded onto an Algarve beach in 1444 under the

gaze of Henry the Navigator is a founding text for Europe’s slave trade:

Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at

each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards heavens fixedly

and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe

to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw them-

selves full length on the ground … To increase their anguish still more,

those who had charge of the partition then arrived and began to separate

them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made

it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their

husbands and brother from brother … mothers clasped their other

children in their arms and lay face downwards on the ground, accepting

wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let

their children be torn from them.

As the numbers grew the techniques became industrialised. They were

soon arriving in Portugal ‘piled up in the holds of ships, 25 or 40 at atime, badly fed, shackled together back to back’. The Portuguese were

Europe’s largest importer of captured human beings. By the mid-16th

century probably 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon were black

slaves, but it was with the settlement of Brazil and the demand for

labour in its plantations and gold mines that transatlantic slavery took

off. The trading post of Elmina on the coast of Ghana, centre of the gold

trade, became in turn the efficient holding pen and point of departure

for tens of thousands of people. They exited out of the Door of No Return

onto ships colloquially referred to as coffins. Half died in transit. Over

three hundred years between three and five million people were forcibly

moved to Brazil alone, a colossal involuntary migration.

The slave ships were an inevitable breeding ground for disease but

the wider mobility of the Portuguese themselves contributed to the

spread of pathogens around the world. Gama’s ships and their succes-

sors may have introduced syphilis to India and beyond: to Timor, where

it was referred to as the Portuguese disease, and to China. Like the

Anonymous portraitpresumed to be ofVasco da Gama, c.1524.


5/8


PORTUGAL

A chart of Brazil by the Portuguese cartographer Fernão Vaz Dourado, 1571.


6/8


Spanish, they carried with them into South America the diseases of

Europe such as tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and TB. Smallpox

and typhus proved particularly devastating to the native peoples of

the Amazon.

T

HE DEVELOPMENT OF A Portuguese commercial empire in the

16th century, stretching from South America to China, initiat-

ed long-range trading networks. It saw the start of a system that

could exchange goods across hemispheres. Lenses travelledfrom Germany to China, elephants from Sri Lanka to Vienna. All passed

through Lisbon as the major hub and the clearing house for goods in

and out of Europe. The historian John Russell-Wood has reconstructed

examples of the kinds of intricate exchanges that took place. A clock

made in Flanders was exported from Lisbon. Carried to the Portuguese

hub at Goa, it found no buyers and was taken on to Malacca on the Malay

Peninsula where it was exchanged for sandalwood (probably from Sri

Lanka or Southern India). The sandalwood was shipped to Macao where

it was sold for gold. The gold was carried by Portuguese middlemen to

Nagasaki, where it was used to buy a valuable work of art, a painted

screen. This was transported back to Goa and eventually returned to

Lisbon. Cloves that would be sold in Morocco made the journey from

Ternate in Eastern Indonesia, via Malacca, Cochin and Lisbon and would

be exchanged for wheat that would find its way to West Africa. Vene-

tian glass beads and Flemish brass pans, carried via Lisbon to Elmina,

might be exchanged for pepper, gold, slaves and monkeys, that would

be shipped back to Bristol, Antwerp and Genoa. All these commodities

travelled in Portuguese vessels.

WITHIN THE SEPARATE OCEANS triangular trades developed. Goods

circulated in the Atlantic Ocean between Portugal, Angola and Brazil.

Within the Indian Ocean and beyond, valuable trading cycles often

never touched the mother country at all. Goa became the hub of one

inter-Indian Ocean trade, moving goods and foodstuffs between the

Swahili coast, the Persian Gulf and western India; Portuguese Malacca

was the centre of another, onwards to the Spice Islands, China and Japan.

When the Ming dynasty turned inwards and banned all foreign trade,

Portuguese merchants cornered an intermediary market between China

and Japan, shuttling silk, gold and porcelain from Macao to Nagasaki,

returning with Japanese silver and copper. It gave them a lucrative role

in Far Eastern commerce. Gold, initially from West Africa then from

the kingdom of Mutapa in southern Africa and later Brazil, was thelubricant of these trades. The Portuguese had a major role in bullion

flows, reshaping economies in their wake. They were instrumental

in shifting Spanish silver across the world as far as China, which had a

preference for the metal, and initiating a price revolution in India. They

were facilitators in technology transfer, too, introducing firearms into

Japan in 1543, where they were quickly adopted, together with pilot

charts. The Jesuits, although limited in their success in China, interested

the ruling dynasty in astrolabes and other astronomical instruments,

constructed an observatory in Beijing and produced the first Chinese

maps to show the Americas.

This long-distance interchange of commodities extended to

plants and foodstuffs. As with many areas of foreign contact, there

was a genuine curiosity in the flora of new worlds. The work of the

Goods circulated in the Atlantic

Ocean between Portugal, Angolaand Brazil. Trading cycles oftennever touched the mother country

Top: Elmina Castle in Ghana, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and used bythem and then Dutch and English traders as a base for dealing in slaves.

Above: 'How the Portuguese whip their slaves when they run away',from Relation d'un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 by Franois Froger.


7/8


PORTUGAL

Portuguese Jewish doctor, Garcia de Orta, a pioneering empirical bota-

nist and author of a book on the herbs and plants of Goa, aroused wide

interest in Europe, via translations and plagiarised versions. As the con-

nections between the furthest reaches of their empire grew stronger, de-

liberate experiments were made to transplant crops from one continent

to another, sometimes by carrying whole plants, more often by taking

seeds on their voyages. These initiatives made a major contribution

to the dissemination of plant species, food supply and diet across the

globe. They introduced spices from the East Indies to Brazil, returning

cashews, peanuts and peppers to both China and India, to which theyalso introduced pineapples and tobacco. There was a significant species

exchange across the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa: maize, manioc,

cashews, sweet potatoes and peanuts travelled east on Portuguese ships,

returning from the West Coast of Africa with red peppers, bananas,

yams. From Portugal, vegetables, citrus fruits and sugar cane reached

the New World. The Jesuits sent Chinese boars to Portugal. Filo pastry

from North Africa led to the samosa in India and the spring roll in China;

rhubarb came to Europe from South China, satsumas from

Japan. Genetic material was being shunted around the world.

The interactions between the Portuguese and other

peoples created an immense quantity of information. The first

century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping

away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the

received wisdom of ancient authority – the tales of dog-headed men and

birds that could swallow elephants – by the empirical observation of ge-

ography, climate, natural history and cultures that ushered in the early

modern age. It stimulated the production of a vast and varied output

of written material, which seeped into other European languages. By

the 1600s, writers such as Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas were

transmitting Portuguese knowledge into English.

IF THE PORTUGUESE described what they saw, they were also seen

in turn as objects of curiosity, fear and wonder. The Sinhalese wereperplexed by their endemic restlessness and their eating habits, de-

claring them to be ‘a very white and beautiful people, who wear hats

and boots of iron and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white

stone and drink blood’. The Japanese scrutinised the namban-jin (the

Southern Barbarians, because they arrived via Korea) and scrupulously

illustrated their ships, their ballooning pantaloons and strange hats in

comic detail, lampooning their mannerisms and their large noses as

well as the appearance of the tall, black-robed Jesuits. Across

the trading world images and artefacts of the Other reflected

a new trans-hemispheric awareness. Many of the cultures

to which the Portuguese travelled came to produce hybrid

works of art: the Madonna and child as Chinese figurines;

carved ivory boxes from Sri Lanka mixing Hindu deities with

If the Portuguese described what they saw, they were also seen in turn asobjects of curiosity, fear and wonder

A Portuguesemerchant isgreeted by hisIndian house-hold, early 16thcentury.


8/8


FURTHER READING

A.J.R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move (Carcanet, 1992).

Bailey Diffie and George Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese

Empire, 1415–1580 (University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

Jay A. Levenson, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the

16th and 17th Centuries (Smithsonian Books, 2007).

Roger Crowley’s Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First

Global Empire was published by Faber & Faber in September 2015.

representations of European kings and images from Dürer; Portuguese

nobles in palanquins in Goan art and their ambassadors in Mughal

miniatures; Benin bronzes of Portuguese soldiers with muskets and

crossbows; and carved salt-cellars topped by miniature European ships.

Much of this art was religious. The missionary fathers worked tire-

lessly at Christian presentation in local idioms and, from as faraway as

China, where blue and white porcelain was produced bearing the arms

of Manuel I, artefacts were being created for distant markets.

A great deal of this exotica, along with foodstuffs, ethnographic‘specimens’ (captured slaves or emissaries from beyond) plants and

animals, worked its way back to Europe. It sharpened both an awareness

of other cultures and the perspective on the West’s place in an expanded

world. Particularly famous were two animals sent to Manuel I around

1513: a white elephant and an equally rare white rhino; the first live

specimen in Europe since the time of the Romans. Manuel delivered

the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador,

Tristão da Cunha. A cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians,

and an assortment of wild animals – leopards, parrots and a panther –

entered Rome, watched by a gawping crowd. A second gift, the rhino,

drowned en route, but Dürer was able to produce a passable likeness

armed only with a rough sketch.

THE APPRECIATION OF the world beyond and its artefacts –the namban paintings from Japan, intricate worked ivories

from Benin, inlaid chests from West India – expanded Europe’s

ideas of visual possibilities and their wonder. One observer of

the people of Sierra Leone noted them to be ‘very skilled in manual

work, they produce salt-cellars in ivory and spoons and whatever task

one sketches for them, they carve in ivory’. Dürer was amazed by such

artefacts: ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my

heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works

of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands.

Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.’

Portugal’s commercial dominance of large swathes of the world

lasted little more than a century. Yet the images, transmissions and

trades that it engendered left a significant and long-lasting influence onthe culture, food, flora, art, history, languages, and genes of the planet,

together with dark shadows: the exploitation, violence and slavery that

its colonial successors inherited. When the Dutch first dismantled its

spice empire they found that Portuguese was the lingua franca of the

commercial world from China to Brazil and were compelled to use it.

Writing about the first decades of Portuguese exploration the

16th-century historian João de Barros described the viceroy of India,

Francisco de Almeida addressing an Indian raja with the assertion that

‘the principal intention of his king Don Manuel in making these dis-

coveries was the desire to communicate with the royal families of these

parts, so that trade might develop, an activity that results from human

needs, and that depends on a ring of friendship through communicat-

ing with one another’. It was a prescient awareness of the origins and

benefits of long-distance trade: the runaway train of globalisation thatstarted with Vasco da Gama.

Top: an ivory salt vessel decorated with figures of Portuguesenoblemen, with the lid in the shape of a ship, Benin, West Africa,16th century.

Above: Portuguese disembark in Japan, Namban screen, c.1600.

Date post:	07-Jul-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	yefim-gordon
View:	215 times
Download:	0 times

Portugal - The First Global Empire

Documents